Tags
The earliest European depiction of a cannon, from an English manuscript of 1326. This vase-shaped weapon is very different from later Western artillery, but quite similar to some Chinese guns of the late thirteenth century. Both the idea of cannon and the formula for gunpowder may have reached Europe directly from China, carried westward along the ‘silk road’ caravan route across Central Asia.
Early 15th Century Handgun. At Orleans in 1429, English captains were shot at ranges of 250 yards. Key factor in general adoption of handguns are ease of use, effectiveness against armour and, in case of continental armies, they are cheaper than crossbows. In 1430 Pietroni Belli wrote of seeing a bullet from a handgun pass through three unarmoured men.
The full history of gunpowder is complex, and not independent from other events and issues. At the heart of the matter is a general problem of technology in history; namely the fact that invention alone is rarely, if ever, sufficient and necessary enough in itself to force any broader social or political revolution. More important – more powerful- than any new item of technology is the place of that technology in the minds of its users. People, not things, make revolutions. Sometimes a society seizes upon the widest possibilities of technological change (as with the steam engine in nineteenth-century Britain, or with the computer in our own times) and everything is made anew: ways of thinking and ways of doing are transformed forever. But surprisingly often – surprising only in hindsight, of course, and from the perspective of our own culture – what we easily identify as a potentially revolutionary new technology sparked no great chain reaction of cultural, political or social change. Sophisticated societies sometimes fail to make the choices that we find obvious.
For example, in the Roman Empire experimentation with vacuum and steam power produced only tricks and toys, such as automatic temple-door-opening machines; and Roman watermills, though apparently powerful and useful, remained rare: despite a fertile combination of theory, wealth and materials, there was no late antique industrial revolution – who, after all, in a world of abundant slave labour and complacent landed elites would have sought such a revolution? Even in military history, a field often reduced to weapons lore, new technology alone – even radical and powerful new technology – is never the whole of the story. Put simply, it can happen that new weapons, even potent new weapons, supplement and replace the old without inspiring or forcing any fundamental re-evaluation of warfare.
Such was the case of gunpowder in gunpowder’s homeland, China. By the middle of the ninth century AD Taoist alchemical philosophers pursuing life-extending elixirs had perfected the recipe for a magically explosive mixture of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre: gunpowder. Over the next four hundred years Chinese technicians progressively developed whole new families of weapons based on the smoking, stinking, bursting stuff: flame-throwing ‘fire lances’; exploding grenades and larger, catapult-launched bombs; shrieking rockets; man-portable guns, and, by at least the end of the thirteenth century, bulbous metal vessels that must be considered the first true cannon. This march from exploding powder to effective artillery was an impressive, sustained technological achievement – but it did not materially challenge the long-standing traditions of Chinese warfare, or alter the overall patterns of Chinese history. Why not? Perhaps most importantly, China’s ruling bureaucrats, in their serene confidence that power would always be rooted in the ancient literary and philosophical classics, remained essentially aloof; the mechanics of warfare were beneath their interest. Also, imperial China remained just that: imperial. With authority ultimately flowing from the central court – literally flowing from the pens of the scholar administrators no class or community there was tempted or inspired to fundamentally rethink military affairs.
Circumstances were far different on the other side of the globe, in Europe. There assertive burghers, ambitious princes and proud, militant nobles all existed in fractious, competitive, war-making plenty; there was no true controlling political or social centre – no imperial Rome or Peking – to guide the affairs and thoughts of late medieval Europe. And by the fifteenth century, just as gunpowder was finding a place on the European battlefield, Europe’s cultural elite – its thinkers and rulers – had gained the confidence to engage in the wholesale redefinition of their institutions, beliefs and practices: the Renaissance. Gunpowder was one of many seeds of change in this restless, unsettled, but also curious and confident world. Across the same decades during which Alberti rewrote the rules of painting (1435), Gutenburg helped introduce book printing (c. 1455), Columbus reached America and da Gama India (1492 and 1498), Luther successfully challenged the Catholic Church (from 1517) and Copernicus declared a solar-centric universe (1543), European military experts, engineers, captains, interested intellectuals – similarly rethought and remade the art of war.
Given the ferment of the age, it would have been surprising had warfare evaded investigation and reform. It did not. By the middle of the sixteenth century European war was very different from what it had been a century before. Knights had become officers, and armies were no longer led by heroes but were directed by generals. Infantry marched in step and drilled in ordered formations of ranks and files. Fortress and siege engineering alike depended on exacting and precise geometric rules. And as the techniques of European warfare changed, so did its underlying spirit. War, it was assumed by the middle of the sixteenth century, could be organized and analysed; it was reducible to theory and formula, it could be made into a science and set down in treatises. The whole of this change – mental, technical and material – amounted to a military Renaissance, a revolution in the practice of war that was no less profound than the simultaneous transformations taking place in the arts and in religion. The proliferation of gunpowder weapons was a component of this military revolution but not its cause – the real cause was the deep Renaissance habit of rethinking anything and everything, including war. And that habit, of course, was applied to the possibilities and problems of gunpowder as a tool of war.
The first indisputable mention of guns in Europe is from Florence and is dated 1326. An English illuminated manuscript dated to the same year shows a bottle shaped gun firing an arrow. It was soon realised that a stone or lead ball was a far more efficient projectile for the new weapon.
Although the earliest guns were can-non it was not long before smaller ‘hand guns’ were being produced. These were initially tubes on a stick fired in much the same way as cannon.
Although the first hand guns were hopelessly inefficient, slow to load and hard to aim, they were used. With the introduction of corned gun-powder in the mid Fifteenth century guns became even more powerful. On the continent some states were quick to see the advantages of firearms. In 1490 the Venetians replaced all their cross-bows with guns.
